Scenes from a Mixed Marriage
I posted this on Altercation today:
Scenes from a Mixed MarriageBy Siva Vaidhyanathan
Our friends watched in horror as Melissa and I leapt from our chairs and barked at each other. “What does he think he’s doing? He charged into Pedro!” she cried. “You can’t throw an old man to the ground,” I responded. Our voices screeched and cracked as we volleyed our respective incommensurate interpretations of what we had just witnessed. We didn’t look at each other the rest of the game.
During a brawl between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees in the 2003 American League playoff series the human bowling ball we know as Yankee Bench Coach Don Zimmer, then 72 years-old, charged like a bull, his head (metal plate inside) down, directly at Red Sox ace right-hander Pedro Martinez. Martinez reached out and shifted Zimmer’s weight just enough to force him to tumble. Pedro walked away unscathed. Zimmer climbed back up dazed.
I can look back on the event now and conclude that Zimmer was the aggressor. But in the heat of that pennant race, which the Yankees naturally won, I was not willing to concede anything. The Red Sox were cheap and dirty. Pedro was and remains a headhunter. In fact, he precipitated the larger melee when he beaned Yankee batter Karim Garcia the previous inning. While I am willing now to concede Zimmer’s culpability, my wife Melissa has never faced the awful truth that the Red Sox were at fault at large. They pushed the Yankees to the point where they had to respond.
This week we are revisiting the most trying times in our two-year marriage. Our lives together have involved heroic last-inning home runs by the likes of Aaron Boone and David Ortiz. The 2005 season has come down to three games in Boston. We will watch them together, sitting on opposite ends of the room. We will try not to carry our frustrations and joys beyond the game itself. But it won’t be easy. On this issue, we have incompatible world views and furious passions.
Melissa and I have a wonderful mixed marriage. We only fight over baseball. She is a Red Sox fan from birth, raised just outside of Boston. I am a Yankee fan by conversion. I happened to move to Manhattan six years ago, having been a free-agent American League baseball fan my whole life. New York was my first major league town, so I comfortably fit into the confident (she says arrogant) mindset of the Yankee faithful. After years of suffering too many almost-wins by my childhood allegiances, the Buffalo Bills and Sabres, I deserve to claim for myself the glory of the Yankees. I’ve earned the glory. I’ve served my penance.
Melissa can’t understand any of this. She sees the Yankees as unalloyed evil. She hates all Yankee fans, except for those of her close acquaintance, which fortunately includes me. She might allow for some Yankee support among those who were born here and raised by other Yankee fans (although the mere presence of the Mets option undermines much of this allowance). But it’s beyond her to imagine why someone would choose the Yankees. It’s a testament to how much she loves me that she is willing to rise above this conundrum.
The part of my conversion that irks Melissa the most is my claim of suffering. She and all Red Sox fans – until last year, that is – think of themselves as the ultimate martyrs. Anyone else’s martyrdom threatens their status. That’s why Red Sox fans deeply wished the Cubs would get it done. They hate the competition. Now they also have to listen to Astros, Rangers, Indians, Padres, Brewers, White Sox, and Giants fans complain about their multi-decade championship droughts. Even this year, unsure how to react to success, Red Sox fans have posed themselves as victims, upstarts, insurgents, vagabonds, and lovable losers.
Buffalo fans, of course, have it far worse than anyone. We haven’t had major league baseball since the Federal League folded in 1915. Our Bills won two AFL championships in the 1960s and lost four consecutive Superbowls in the 1990s. The Sabres made it twice to the NHL finals, only to lose (although the last one, in 1999, was stolen from us by a cheating Dallas Stars team and league officials who would not permit another Rust Belt team to hoist the Stanley Cup). Our NBA team, the Braves, left in 1978 for San Diego. Even as the (now Los Angeles) Clippers, the team is the very paradigm of futility.
Melissa and her family have been able to maintain the cognitive dissonance required to brag about their football team’s three Superbowl rings while wallowing in self-pity over their baseball frustration. Whenever I bring up the remarkable successes of the Bruins or Celtics, I get puzzled looks as if those sports hardly matter.
I love Yankee Stadium. I consider it a romantic temple because I proposed to Melissa in the upper deck during a Red Sox-Yankee game back in September 2002. Of course, the Yankees won that game. Don’t worry. I choose to whisper the question in her ear during the seventh-inning stretch rather than post it on the Diamond Vision screen. In contrast, Melissa merely tolerates the House that Ruth Built. She will only join me there when the Red Sox are in town. She rolls her eyes when we drive by it on the Deegan Expressway and I remind her of my proposal. When the Sox play there we walk through the stadium clad in matching-yet-contrasting t-shirts and caps, people always remark about the improbability of our union. When I leave her alone to retrieve concessions, she reports, Yankee fans harass her mercilessly.
Lately her mother has been coming down for those weekends to take my seat. So I don’t get to experience the rage and ecstasy that most Yankee fans enjoy when they beat the Red Sox. I always have to play it cool for the sake of the family. Fortunately, Melissa is neither a sore winner nor loser. So we both go easy on each other most of the time. Only at those times when the teams bean and brawls do we let our true natures out.
Last year, I left for Europe when the Yankees went up 3-0 in the American League Championship Series. I breathed a sigh of relief as I waited for my flight in JFK Airport. I would miss the fourth and final game and yet another moment of humiliation for the Red Sox. But at least Melissa would not reflect her frustration on me and I could gloat without guilt out of her sight. It did not turn out that way, of course. Every day that next week I would log on to read the story of the previous night’s collapse. By the time I returned, the Yankees were done and the Red Sox stunned by their own success. I very discreetly cheered for the Cardinals to win the World Series. But I knew that the Sox had quenched any deep sense of institutional inferiority. They had quashed the curse.
Last fall, I hugged her as she cried for joy, unable to believe the triumphal feeling she had hoped for her whole life but never really expected. I was sincerely happy that she could be that happy. But this year, with the race for the American League East knotted up and the loser likely to miss the playoffs entirely, it could not be more tense around here. I am certain that the Red Sox will have to endure another 86-year exile from the Promised Land.
Oh, and we have decided to raise the children as Red Sox fans. We figure they will have every other advantage in life. We don’t want them to be too happy.